Naked Economics: Undressing the Dismal Science pdfdrive com

particularly egregious example, Congress was still passing legislation in May
1977 to deal with the recession that ended in March 1975.
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At the end of the
relatively mild 2001–2002 recession, the New York Times ran the following
headline: “Fed Chief Sees Decline Over; House Passes Recovery Bill.” I’m not
making this stuff up.
What about the Obama stimulus? The American Recovery and Reinvestment
Act was seemingly timely, but most of the money was not spent immediately
(though there still can be a psychological benefit, and therefore an economic
benefit, to simply announcing that lots of spending is coming). Critics of this
huge economic intervention argued that it lavished borrowed government money
on all kinds of unimaginable projects, some of them quite silly, and added huge
sums to the national debt. Proponents of the stimulus, such as Obama’s chair of
the Council of Economic Advisers, Christina Romer, made the case that the
$787 billion stimulus raised real GDP growth by 2 to 3 percentage points and
saved a million jobs.
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As far as I can tell, they’re both right. I was a
congressional candidate at the time, so my views are a matter of public record
(for the small number of people who paid attention to them). The economy was
caught in dangerous feedback loops—foreclosures were causing banking
problems which were causing layoffs which were causing foreclosures, and so
on. I was fond of saying, “A bad stimulus is better than no stimulus, and a bad
stimulus is what we got.” The government needed to do something to break the
cycle (in part because monetary policy was not working, as will be explained in
a moment). I would have preferred that the government target more of the
spending toward infrastructure and human capital investments to improve the
long-term productive capacity of the nation. I agree that rising government
indebtedness is a problem, as will be discussed in
Chapter 11
. That said, given

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the financial panic described earlier in the chapter and the capacity for bad
economic events to beget more bad economic events, there is a reasonable
argument to be made that even paying people to dig holes and then fill them in
would have been a better policy choice than doing nothing.
The second tool at the government’s disposal is monetary policy, which has
the potential to affect the economy faster than you can read this paragraph. The
chair of the Federal Reserve can raise or lower short-term interest rates with one
phone call. No haggling with Congress; no waiting years for tax cuts. As a
result, there is now a consensus among economists that normal business cycles
are best managed with monetary policy. The whole next chapter is devoted to the
mysterious workings of the Federal Reserve. For now, suffice it to say that
cutting interest rates makes it cheaper for consumers to buy houses, cars, and
other big-ticket items as well as for firms to invest in new plants and machinery.
Cheap money from the Fed pries wallets open again.
During the depths of the “Great Recession” of 2007, however, the Fed
couldn’t make money any cheaper. The Fed pushed short-term interest rates all
the way down to zero, for all intents and purposes, but consumers and businesses
still weren’t willing to borrow and spend (and unhealthy banks were in a poor
position to lend). At that point, monetary policy can’t do anything more; it
becomes like “pushing on a wet noodle,” as Keynes originally described it. This
is the economic rationale for turning to a fiscal stimulus as well.
I conceded earlier in this chapter that GDP is not the only measure of economic
progress. Our economy consists of hundreds of millions of people living in
various states of happiness or unhappiness. Any president recovering from a
horseshoe accident would demand a handful of other economic indicators, just as
emergency room physicians ask for a patient’s vital signs (or at least that is what
they do on Grey’s Anatomy). If you were to take the vital signs of any economy
on the planet, here are the economic indicators, along with GDP, that
policymakers would ask for first.